


Soldier Coming Home

by kikibug13



Category: Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:03:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13/pseuds/kikibug13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dink's thoughts as the shuttle taking  him home after the defeat of th Buggers is about to land.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soldier Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chaos_harmony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_harmony/gifts).



> Many many many thanks to my amazing kicakss beta, [Anna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/adsartha), and merry holidays!

Dink looked down at the lot where they were about to land. Small rectangle of concrete, like he'd seen on the vids, many times over. He must have come up from one of these, but he didn't remember. It wasn't a surprise.

They were coming home. Victorious, supposedly. Well, they were, or Ender was, and they had done their share. But that was done with. Now came the difficult part.

Dink called to his mind's eye the faces of the jeesh. His friends. None of them were here with him, they'd said their good-byes earlier, before each of them (sometimes alone, sometimes in twos or threes) went down for the final leg of the journey in shuttles. They'd looked at each other as though faces and voices weren't already burned into their memories. Whatever happened, together as they were now? They never would be again, and they knew it. Might as well remember each other as they were. Still children's faces, even though their eyes were anything but. They'd destroyed a race. And now they were going home, to homes they hadn't known but hoped would be good places. Except he had little doubt what was going to happen there.

The war that had flashed around them after the Buggers were defeated? That was only the beginning. The attempt to unbalance things and then the immediate suppression, showing that the powers that be weren't that easily overthrown.

But they weren't impossible to overthrow. Now that the threat that unified them all was gone, the fissures and cracks among the nations of the world were going to show again. Show and push away. Some were going to be united, other separated, and the wars were going to come. Just as he had always known.

Sure, he had been wrong about the Buggers being a fictitious threat. But now they weren't even that. And he was very sure he was right about this.

They weren't even adults yet, not that it would matter. They should go back to school, try to be kids for a while, or whatever, adolescents. Teenagers, with all the petty emotional dramas that went with that. Which they never could be, they hadn't gone through the steps leading up to it, but they were going to try anyway. Maybe they'd get a year or two before their governments called them to service. Or some governments - Netherlands didn't have an army, so he didn't think he could be used, at home, but somebody would snap him up, Dink was sure.

Or maybe he would go look for an assignment on his own. He didn't think he would, he'd seen violence and hatred and fighting and death enough, where there shouldn't have been any to start with. He didn't think his _parents_ had seen any killing, at least they hadn't before he'd left, the lightning war might have been a different thing, and he had seen so much. Up close and personal, in Ender's eyes, or distant and believed, for a while, to be only pretend. Too much. He was tired of death, and he wasn't going to even get the null-g battle room or anyplace else to have what was going on float out of him. Maybe it would work with a swimming pool or a pond or something.

If it did, he'd have to change locations often. Not even water could hold as much crazy as he was going to get.

Dink's thoughts returned to the ground, now fast approaching, and then bounced back to a long-ago conversation from when Ender had first joined his toon. He didn't even remember his brother anymore. But then, his brother would look and sound nothing like what he might have remembered. He wondered if he had a woman of his own. He was old enough to be married and have a wife; they hadn't really told any of them what to expect when they arrived. Well, he thought nobody's family was gone, they would have told them _that_. If only because they would have no home to be taken to and would have to go to some institution or whatever they had arranged for the heroes, and nobody was told that. He wondered if his brother had a car of his own, that would probably be nice. He'd wanted a car, Dink thought.

And that's as far as his imagination went. He was lacking any reference point to hang his conceptions on. And that was nothing compared to how bad it was going to be when he _got_ home. He was going to go to school, and maybe he'd last there for a while, except his memories of school were even foggier than his memories of his family. He wasn't programmed for peace. He'd spent, what, twice as many years away as he had been home. What was going to be home, now, the military schools had been home for a long time now. He didn't know how to handle peace.

Well. At least that wasn't going to last.

Everybody thought that sending Ender away was going to solve things. Well, no. He didn't think Graff thought so very seriously, though he was one of the people who honestly grieved over shipping the boy out, nor many of the rest of them, though he couldn't be sure everybody realized it was a stopgap measure only.

He _could_ be sure that each and every one of them was going to miss him. And they were going to write letters, to their friend among the stars, about how things were at home. How they were devising strategies against each other. How they were sending people against each other, people who got killed. Just as they had learned together.

They were all crazy, and nobody as crazy as the people who wanted the power and would sacrifice lives to get it. But there was no escaping such people, there never was going to be.

That was the home Dink was returning to. And the one which Ender was forever denied, because no matter what, when he could finally rejoin the normal time stream, too much would have changed. Whatever game they were facing was going to be played out, and peace would probably have returned. Actual peace.

If there was one thing Dink Meeker could not imagine, it was peace. Which was theoretically the whole point to them having been trained, except the training itself canceled that ideal out.

He might have thought it ironic. As he came down the steps of the shuttle and saw the two men and a woman standing by the car waiting for him, he only thought it sad.


End file.
